Consumer Duty

Consumer Duty

› Meeting the requirements of the Financial Conduct Authority’s new Consumer Duty regulations requires a change of both mindset and process for leasing companies and brokers. They fully accept the spirit of the new rules to give private consumers greater protections by bringing more transparency to financial services, but both quantitative and qualitative research has found that there are significant grey areas for leasing companies to resolve.

Overall, 37% of leasing companies and 63% of leasing brokers want a greater understanding of the scope of the rules and how they apply to their businesses, with 37% also seeking greater clarity on what constitutes ‘fair’ value. More than a third of businesses involved in leasing also report that finding specific guidance on how the Consumer Duty applies to their specific sector is a challenge.

For business with roots in the B2B sector, the regulations are forcing a change of mindset as well as practice, while even new retailfocused businesses have appointed full-time compliance officers to ensure they meet FCA guidelines. The scandal and compensation surrounding the miss-selling of PPI haunts businesses in the financial services sector.

As a result, leasing companies now feel the responsibility to inform private drivers about, for example, the implications of early termination fees or excess mileage charges, with the risk that customers sign up for inappropriately low-mileage contracts in order to reduce their rentals, only to incur high charges at the end of the agreement. One suggestion is for leasing companies to provide an annual mileage statement to customers (and brokers if it’s a brokersupplied car) to allow for contract renegotiations, rather than present customers with a sizeable bill at the end of the term.

The obligation to treat customers fairly is also going to be tested by the risk of rising defaults as the cost-of-living crisis impacts on drivers’ ability to keep paying their rentals. In such circumstances, leasing companies expect to offer forbearance and restructure repayment profiles, but if a customer cannot afford to pay, are they “Consumer Duty is a massive change for the industry, a cultural change, and the bar has been set very high by the FCA”

Lakshmi Moorthy, Arval UK

at liberty to repossess a car, even if this leaves the driver without transport that might be essential? And there’s further opacity in the nature of ‘fair’: will a customer be able to insist their electric is collected and tested because it fails to achieve the range promised in the manufacturer’s marketing literature?

Even the ‘cooling off’ period is problematic; should this be the fortnight after the customer places the order, or the fortnight after the car is ready for delivery, by which time the price of the vehicle and the interest rate on the finance may have risen, pushing up the cost of the original rental?

Vehicle contract extensions and more remote working have exposed gaps in fleet compliance procedures when it comes to MoTs. As fleets keep vehicles for longer, a growing proportion of the parc now requires an annual MoT, with leasing and fleet management companies reporting that checks on client vehicles regularly identify cars and vans without a valid MoT.

There are also concerns that the workshop infrastructure will be inadequate to support the maintenance requirements of electric and hydrogen heavy duty trucks, with operators facing pressure to decarbonise before a viable zero emission ecosystem is in place to help them comply with the stipulations of the operating licence.